Where's Noah when you need him?
In the HIV/AIDS field (and particularly in the vaccine development field) there is often talk about "the developing world." The goal in making our vaccine, at least, is to generate a vaccine that will be protective against the strains of the virus that are prevalent in the developing world as well as a vaccine that can be produced and distributed in other areas (a vaccine that doesn't require a cold chain, for those of you in the field). I've been to meetings where the research and diagnostic capabilities of labs in other countries were discussed and suggestions were offered at how we, the haves in this whole scenario, could help out.
When I call "us" the "haves", I refer to the US, those at our university, as well as my lab itself. My lab is exceedingly well-funded. We could probably buy you, if we wanted (and if the pesky Constitution didn't prohibit it). We are currently awaiting the announcement of whether or not we received a grant that is worth a huge sum of money. The funding is nice-we are able to ask the questions that we need to ask without having to think of cost as an object, and are one of the few, if not the only group in the world able to do certain experiments (generally due to reagent/animal cost or labor-we also have an enormously large lab). It's an odd situation for a graduate student in some ways-I see the funding issues that are hitting the field in general and I watch some of my friends end up in difficult situations due to their labs being unable to secure funds, but at the same time, I am entirely insulated from feeling the problem myself and our lab just keeps getting bigger. I think that the problem that we work on is profoundly important and I don't think that it is solvable without the types of work that we do, which are inherently expensive. It certainly leads to uncomfortable situations, both with other students as I mentioned above, and with others outside of the lab. At the big HIV vaccine conference, Iceland and I were trapped at a dinner table one night where we were somewhat abused by a scientist from another university who was very offended by the amount of money that our advisor has and felt the need to take it out on us. (He also stole Iceland's dessert, so that may have added to our ire about the situation.) As exciting as the levels and inequalities of science funding are, however, they are not really the topic of this post.
My affluent lab currently occupies two floors of a small-ish, nearly unmarked brick building that was formerly a high school. This anonymitiy helps to keep us insulated from both protesters and other researchers and sort of keeps us united. It's a good system. Except for the whole converted high school thing. The building is kind of old, and was obviously not designed to be lab space. In the time that I have worked here, we have had a number of power outages due to a poorly designed electrical system. Our vacuum, a lab tool as necessary as electricity or water, is intermittent at best. Even those labs in developing countries that we are supposed to support don't have their experiments disturbed by lack of vacuum power. Lots of other pieces of equiptment are sporadic as well. The most ridiculous part, however, is the heating and cooling system. In each room, there are two wall units. One is the heating unit. The other is the cooling unit. They are each under separate control, and neither should ever be turned off entirely. We have some thermostat controls and can tune them up or down to try to make them battle towards a reasonable temperature. Should we turn our controllers off, however, the units will not turn back on again until maintence plays with them. Maintenance can also shut them off internally leaving us some wall-unit control. I'm sure that you can imagine how much maintenance loves to come over to our out of the way building, and how prompt they are. The controls for the A/C are at my desk. There is also a vent that brings in some air from the outside above my desk, which generally means that I work in temperatures approximating Antarctica. So, in short, the temperatures here are not good. (And that's not mentioning the time when we somehow had snow coming out of one of the units.)
Earlier this week, in my room, the units have started to leak. Every day there are increasingly large puddles everywhere. Today when we came in, a large area encompassing three desks was flooded, and the water showed no intention of subsiding. After many attempts at cleanup, our eventual solution was to turn off the a/c, even though Boston is in the middle of a major heat wave. Maintenance promises that they will come over today to fix the issue, but for now I am working in an over-heating flood zone. Please send aid in the form of diet coke and chocolate.
I wanna go home!
But I can't. One of the other grad students in our lab was stressed about getting things done today, and I agreed to hang out and turn off the cytometers for her (now that I'm all trained on how the crazy people in our lab want me to use them), so I'm stuck here for another half-hour or so. I guess I can't complain too much though-this will still mark the earliest that I have gone home all week. I'm getting down to crunch time with the thesis committee meeting: the meeting is happening on July 14th (it was pushed back slightly) and I need to have a progress report on the 7th. Ick!!! The result has been my working quite a bit recently, which will continue for the next couple of weeks. That might mean that I will be gone for a while, but more likely it will mean that I post more often, since venting is a nice study break.
In some ways, it's really good to be this busy. It keeps my mind off other things that are bugging me (a list which includes: other stressful lab things, an inability to take more time off right now to possibly travel and hang out with various people, people blowing me off when I was trying to be friendly, the freaking oppressive heat, the stuff for my roommate's wedding that I am supposed to be planning, my growing anger about a variety of political topics and a variety of other things that I have some sort of petty grievance about.) Of course, things aren't entirely bad-we've got a new roommate lined up and she seems super cool, so I'm pretty excited about that, I've been having a decent amount of fun lately and I think more cool stuff should be on tap for this weekend.
Anyway-I'm off to check up on the cytometer. Just thought I'd let you know what's going on. I'm guessing some of the stuff from the previous paragraph will require venting soon, so more posts should arrive shortly, but for now I'm just sort of simmering discontent.
GO Patrick!!
I've been meaning to do this for a while now, but I'm just getting around to it now. Oops. Anyway, a man that I work with, Patrick, is in the middle of a bike race called the Race Across America (yes, it goes from San Diego to Atlantic City). The whole thing is pretty impressive-the race is obviously quite grueling and Patrick's dedication and hard work are amazing. Also (and this is one reason why I have hesitated to post this-I feel a little spamalicious linking it, but I really think Patrick's story is impressive and it has become more and more awesome by the day, so I'm sharing it) Patrick is trying to raise some money for AIDS vaccine research, and I've got to say, I'm really impressed by his initiative in trying to raise money and make a difference. So...check out his site
here if you're so inclinded (I particularly recommend the daily newsletters in the News and Events section) So anyway, GO PATRICK!!!!! I'm really impressed by and proud of you!
Things that only happen to me...
This past weekend, I was a bridesmaid in a friend's wedding. Her mom and my mom were best friends in college and my friend and I have known each other our whole lives. The wedding was held in the small town where we grew up, where of course, everyone knows everything about everyone.
Anyway, I was the first bridesmaid to walk down the aisle, being the shortest. My cue was to walk when one particular piece of music was played. During the rehearsal, I got yelled at every time I walked down the aisle for walking too fast. Once the song started, I went on my way down the aisle, concentrating on walking slowly. About a quarter of the way down, I realized that the groomsmen and minister had missed their cue and were not at the front of the church yet. I realized that my options were to a.) stop b.) get to the front of the church and watch the guys walk by me or c.) turn around and go back. In a split second, I made the decision to turn around and walk back and start again when the guys were in their place. The second time I walked I had what many guests called "a gorgeous smile" as I worked very hard not to laugh. I later found out that none of the guests had noticed the missing groomsmen (since they were looking at me), so they were all rather confused as to exactly what happened. We all got a good laugh as everyone joked with me about it in the receiving line...and at the reception... etc. Well, tonight I heard from my mother, who was having a party that was attended by the bride's mother. The bride's mother had just come from watching the wedding video. Turns out that not ONLY was my little parade caught on tape for all of posterity, but the video also caught me saying "OH. SHIT." as I realized the groomsmen were missing. Audibly. A quarter of the way down the aisle of a church. Both my mother and the bride's mother (who are actually two of the more conservative-over-crazy-things people that I know) think it is the funniest thing that they've ever heard. I think that it is the funniest thing I've ever heard, except for the tiny little issue that it happened to me, leaving me also slightly mortified. Mostly, I still think it is hilarious though. I mean, come on, how bad is swearing in church during someone's once in a lifetime special occasion?
It was an all together excellent weekend, and I had a fabulous time (and got NO sleep.) Kegstands in bridesmaid dresses at the after-reception party always signify a good time. (Ahh, yeah, you've got to love rural upstate NY.) I could write many, many more posts covering fun and interesting things that happened this weekend. I've had a pretty busy week getting things back together, but just to let you know, I'm baaaaaack. :)
Well, there goes my good mood...
(and my ever precious free time)
I just got an email that I will be having a thesis committee meeting on July 11th. At said meeting, graduate students must present their research progress since their last meeting to their thesis committee, who then gives suggestions and comments on their progress. This is the committee that will eventually decide when I have done enough to graduate. This is also the committee that was responsible for my horrible, awful, very bad qualifying exam (yes, I passed, but it was no fun) and I have been pretty much successfully avoiding them ever since. Crap crap crap crap crap crap crap. I knew all along that one was in the works for July, but I had sort of convinced myself that it wasn't going to happen and that I could slide along for another few months. Guess not. :(
Important question
So let's just say that our heroine (not to be confused with heroin) received emails from a certain dating website from time to time, featuring people that she might like. What if, one day, she happened to receive an email featuring someone she knows? Should she tell them? (All of this is OBVIOUSLY hypothetical, and bears no resemblance to reality, of course.)
Odds and ends
I managed to get up relatively close to the time when my alarm went off this morning, certainly early enough to get to lab on time and don't feel overly tired. (Although I have a beef with that damn alarm clock: that was an excellent, albeit not exactly PG-13, dream that you interupted. Hmph.)
While walking past my local burrito joint this morning, I got trapped behind two Spanish-speaking men. They moved aside to let me pass, and they definitely checked me out. Now, I don't exactly speak any Spanish at all, and I had my IPod on (but not loud enough so that I couldn't hear them), but I distinctly heard the words "muy caliente" as I walked past. I choose to believe they were not talking about the weather, and my lack of knowledge of any of the other Spanish words that they were saying supports my contention.
I may not be able to do much in the way of experiments today. Why? Well, I set up an experiment that included some reagents that I was out of a couple weeks ago, and I put said reagents on order. Well, today is the moment where I need them, and they are not here yet. Oops. The experiment will work either today or tomorrow, so for now I will wait patiently for the FedEx man to bestow some lovely gift upon me. And I thought I was going to be here late tonight before. *sigh* In any case, this experiment madness may turn out to be a boon (or not?) for y'all, since I have been ruminating on some science and the world-type thoughts for the past couple of days, and may have enough free time to put them into a coherent form.
Oh, and it's still too fucking hot.
It could have been better, I promise.
On Tuesday I wrote this whole long, funny post called "Weekend Update with Immunegirl" all about what had been going on with me, but then my computer ate it. And I was too lazy to write another one. Here are the things that you would have heard about then, minus the cleverness (because I am not having a clever day today)
Friday: Longish day of work followed by a plane trip to NY. Nothing terribly eventful: planes that were delayed enough to make my connection tight, but not so late as to cause problems, and attending a meeting were highlights.
Saturday: Bachelorette Part-ay. Started at 10 am (limo had to be back early because of a prom) driving around in a Stretch Hummer (limo company overbooked because of said prom, thus resulting in us getting an upgrade) touring some of the wineries of the Finger Lakes in upstate NY. Went to 6-ish places between 10 and 4. Bride and six bridesmaids also polished off five-six bottles of wine while driving from place to place in Hummer. (Side note: I can stand in a stretch Hummer. While yes, I am a midget, that should also give you some idea of the ridiculous size of this vehicle) You can likely imagine the state we were in at 4. We managed to rally enough to be in the hotel bar at 7, where we remained for the night. The seven of us were the only women in the whole bar, which was otherwise full of guys who had just come back from 5 years in the Army. Again-you can likely imagine the scene. Suffice it to say, we were rather popular, with trays of shots being brought over to the table all night, thus returning us to the state that we were at at 4 rather quickly. Ah well, it was fun times.
Sunday: Drove to parents' house from Finger Lakes. While en route, got a call from the mother of the bride for whom I am maid of honor in October asking about the planning that I had done for her shower. Said planning mostly consisted of getting the contact information of the other bridesmaids. So now I'm trying to rev up to plan this shower. And then I went to the Syracuse airport where, oops, there was no plane. My plane was having a maintenance problem at DULLES, and thus had not made it to Syracuse. I didn't make it to DC until rather late, and when I finally got there, I had missed the last plane to Boston for the night. The airline gave me a lovely room in the Sheraton in Reston, VA, which I likely would have enjoyed much more had I made it there before midnight, or had I been able to stay past 4:30 am, when I boarded a shuttle back to Dulles.
The rest of the week has been okay and somewhat uneventful. Basically, it has involved lots of sleeping, and lots of shirking things I ought to have been doing. I'm basically caught up now, and looking forward to the FABULOUS weekend that I have coming up. (At least, the not having to get on an airplane part and the hanging out with exciting people on Friday part)
